Whoever ends up winning the UK general election 2015, there’s no denying that there has been a clear winner on social media thus far. If th...

Wednesday, 2 July 2014

Need to rid your profile of it's 'you'-ness? Why click delete when Social Sweepster can do it for you!

So here it is, the revolutionary, the profound, the
questionably unnecessary Social
Sweepster, ready to rid your lives of all its saucy naughtiness and make it
seem a little bit more ‘librarian’.

If that’s what your employer is looking for.

Because maybe they’re not… Maybe they’re looking for
‘personality’. Maybe they want to get an idea of the ‘real you’, in all your
inherently unique, ‘here’s me in front of a beach in Gran Canaria doing my
photo smile’ quirkiness. Maybe they want
to see those pictures of you in the club, and you … at a different club. And
that one where you’re… oh wait.

So you seek the wisdom of our omnipotent, all-mighty Lord
and saviours and ask the Google gods:

‘Dearest Fathers, I am bedeviled with worries. Should I
eradicate those image-tarring photographs from my social media profile forever?
What if I am struck by a severe bout of Alzheimer’s and Facebook is my only
hope of retaining any kind of ability to recall my previous days of brain-cell
destroying substance abuse? Please give me a sign.”

Or maybe just ‘tidy social profile employers.’

Your reply from above arrives, in the form of the top 5 most
SEO-savvy sites, who tell you to banish those beach holiday pics to your
virtual bottom draw.

But now maybe you look too clean, too prissy, too Mr/Miss ‘I
button my shirt up to the top even on a blisteringly hot day in the sun’. (Or
the pleasant 26 degree heat our island so often reaches if the thermometer is
slightly off balance). And no one likes
the office Snoreasaurus now, do they?

Hold the delete button! Whack that picture of me on the
table Christina Aguilera-style back up! All systems go!

The fact is, we can’t, and shouldn't, guess what a potential
employer is thinking when they hunt us down to the corridors of Facebook. Chances
are, if you don’t do something mental like post a mug shot of yourself with the
words ‘I heart Silk Road’ on a banner, you might just get through to the
interview stage.

Anyway, to the point at hand. Social Sweepster is offering to clean
up your social media profiles and make you seem (entirely fictitiously) prim
and proper, all for a small offering of your finest gold coins. Apparently they
can detect the profane, distinguish the pleasantly tipsy from the outright
outrageous, and with a few swift clicks magic away your entire sordid past.

Alternatively of course, you could just adopt a few privacy
settings, and then use your index finger to put some ever so slight downward
pressure on the mouse and expunge those pictures where you’re swigging from an
unmarked bottle yourself. My personal thought process went a bit like this:

Am I going to pay a website to delete a few pictures of me
with beer dribbling down my face?